TABLE OF CONTENTS C LAUTENBERGER, University of California, USA, J TORERO, University of Edinburgh, UK and C FERNANDEZ-PELLO, University of California, USA
As it is currently used by the fire community, 'flammability' may be loosely associated with a material's combustibility or its inherent fire hazard. However, this definition is ambiguous because both combustibility and fire hazard are complex and depend on many parameters related to the material, its end use configuration, and the environmental conditions. It is more useful to define flammability in terms of characteristics that may be directly measured or inferred from laboratory tests and then used to assign relative rankings to different materials. With this in mind, a better yet still imperfect definition of flammability is: the ease with which a material is ignited, the intensity with which it burns and releases heat once ignited, its propensity to spread fire, and the rate at which it generates smoke and toxic combustion products during gasification and burning. A comprehensive evaluation of a material's overall flammability may require data from several laboratory tests, perhaps combined with some form of analysis or modeling to interpret the results properly.
In the following sections, simplified analysis is used to identify the 'fire properties' that affect a material's flammability as defined above. Emphasis is given to those properties that may be directly measured or calculated from bench-scale flammability tests.
A material's ignition resistance is a critical measure of flammability because there is no fire...
